NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE
JAPAN ONLY TAKES A BODY BLOW IN COURT
Japan's Cultural Bias Against Foreigners Comes Under Attack(amended version)

November 15, 1999
Front Page, Column One

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

OKYO -- After Ana Bortz arrived from Brazil six years ago, she -- like many foreigners
who live here -- grew used to the countless means employed by the Japanese to enforce
distinctions between themselves and others.

She endured the bureaucratic devices, like the re-entry permits foreigners need to
return to Japan even when they already have a visa, and the fingerprinting that every
outsider has to undergo to get a temporary resident's card.

She even became inured to the way Japanese avoid sitting next to foreigners on the
subway. Or, worse for her, the almost daily stereotyping of Brazilians as criminals
in the local press.

But what Ms. Bortz, 35, a reporter for a Brazilian satellite television network,
said she had not been prepared for was being escorted out of a jewelry store in Hamamatsu
City, where she lives, because the store's owners, as they stated adamantly, had
a policy of refusing people of her nationality.

So, setting off what may one day be looked back upon as the Japanese equivalent of
Rosa Parks' defiance of bus segregation in Montgomery, Ala., Ms. Bortz took on the
discrimination against foreigners in Japan's courts, and to the surprise of many,
including herself, she won.

"This sort of thing is a very big problem in Japan, but its discussion has remained
taboo," Ms. Bortz said. "This country has signed international conventions
against discrimination but has never wanted to deal with the subject domestically.
For a country that talks about getting a chair on the Security Council, these kinds
of attitudes are just shocking."

More than the victory of an individual, the Bortz case is already being seen by many
foreigners grappling with the legal system here as an invaluable precedent in their
antidiscrimination struggle.

In English, Japan's 1946 constitution, written largely by American officials during
the military occupation, states that "all of the people are equal under the
law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations
because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin."

In the Japanese version, however, all of the people is rendered "kokumin,"
essentially meaning all Japanese people.

In the absence of Japanese laws covering the treatment of foreigners, the judge in
the Bortz case said that the country must abide by its international treaties. In
1996, 31 years after the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
was adopted by the United Nations, Japan finally signed it, becoming the 148th country
to do so.

"This was an illegal act against an individual," ruled Tetsuro So, a Shizuoka
district court judge, who cited Japan's treaty obligation last month in awarding
Ms. Bortz $15,000 in damages. "Ejecting the plaintiff from the store merely
because she was a Brazilian was unfair." Because the judgment was based on international
law, it cannot be appealed under Japanese law.

Ms. Bortz's lawyer, Hideyo Ogawa, said: "Frankly speaking, this case's influence
will be very big. Just as I didn't know of the existence of this treaty beforehand,
neither did most other lawyers."

The store owner, Takahisa Suzuki, has not been giving interviews. In court he said
that he had asked Ms. Bortz to leave because her behavior was "unnatural."
He and his wife also said that fears of crime by Brazilians was justified, and hence
did not constitute discrimination.

For years many foreigners living in Japan have suffered silently when landlords denied
them housing. They have put up with employment contracts that treat them differently
from Japanese, and have been turned away from public establishments like bars, restaurants
and hot baths with signs in their windows reading "Japanese Only."

But if the Bortz case stands out as the lone breakthrough for now, it comes as a
wave of challenges is being brought by foreigners who feel that if they can do nothing
about the famous Japanese standoffishness toward outsiders, they can at least insist
on equal treatment before the law.

Cynthia Worthington, an American, has been battling what she says is the disparate
treatment of Japanese and foreign faculty almost from the day she was hired by Kumamoto
Prefectural University as a professor of English in 1993.

Dr. Worthington was hired after responding to a job listing for a full-time position,
and was subsequently told that as a foreigner, what she would be given was "special
irregular" status.

"We were employed on a year-to-year basis, we were not entitled to prefectural
housing, we couldn't join the credit union and we didn't get bonuses," she said.
"They were calling us part-time workers, and yet they were giving us full-time
responsibilities, in the classroom, on committees and with research. The only difference
was that we were foreign."

Three years ago, Dr. Worthington, along with other foreign faculty members, formed
a union to pressure the university into offering them the same treatment it accorded
its Japanese staff. The movement held a strike, and drew support from the community,
eventually earning the attention of a
parliamentary labor committee that got the university to back off, at least temporarily,
from its bid to get rid of the troublesome foreigners altogether.

"Foreigners are discriminated against in Japan, period," Dr. Worthington
said. "What has changed is that people are trying to do something about it."

In one victory, after years of complaints by foreign embassies, Japan will end the
fingerprinting of foreign residents next April.

Japan has always stood out as a stubbornly, proudly near-monoethnic nation. This
has meant that few concessions are made to foreigners.

Japan has the lowest percentages of immigrants and expatriate workers of any advanced
industrialized nation -- about 1 percent of the population. Naturalization, even
for Koreans who have lived here for generations and fought in wars for Japan, is
extremely difficult. On average, fewer than 20 people are legally recognized as refugees
each year.

Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has been one of the rare Japanese
voices for change.

"Japanese people are relatively monoethnic," she said in a speech in Tokyo
recently, urging her country to consider globalization in terms of cultural openness.
"We live under the illusion of one ethnic race, one culture. A monoethnic island
of prosperity won't survive in the 21st century."

David Aldwinckle, an American who has lived in Japan for 12 years, has made the notion
of bringing multiculturalism to the country something of a personal crusade. Living
in the northern city of Sapporo, he has fought discrimination against foreigners
for years, organizing quiet protests
against hot baths that deny access to non-Japanese, or insisting that he and his
Japanese wife be listed in marriage records the same way any Japanese couple would
be.

The challenge now for the 34-year-old university professor is obtaining Japanese
citizenship. The process is kept so exclusive that more foreigners are naturalized
each week in the United States than in Japan in an entire year. Indeed, rejections
are known to occur over something as minor as a speeding ticket.

"I have often sat and wondered why things are this way in Japan," Aldwinckle
said. "There is a real fear and misunderstanding of things that are different.
They don't know how to deal with things that are abnormal to them, and they are afraid
of what will happen if the differences are allowed to stand."